A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away by Hirsch Paul;

Author:Hirsch, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2019-08-15T11:24:52+00:00

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In my career I have had a number of mishaps involving the cutting of the negative for my films, as when the neg cutter miscut the explosion of the Death Star in Star Wars (chapter 8). Or when the splices in Sisters were all made crooked on a misaligned splicer (chapter 5). But the most horrendous negative disaster occurred on Blow Out.

In my very first job as a shipping clerk at Dynamic Films, I learned that you never ever ship anything on Friday. If the shipment should go astray, two days will go by before you discover the loss, which makes recovery that much more difficult. Blow Out was filmed in Philadelphia, so the processing was done in New York, at Technicolor. The studio decided that rather than cut the negative in New York, that would be done on the West Coast, so all the processed film was packaged for shipping to Technicolor Labs in L.A.

Somehow, the shipment went out on a Friday. We were at the mix the following Monday morning when we got a phone call from the lab in L.A. There were four cartons of negative missing, containing footage from four days’ shooting. Apparently, the truck driver who collected the cartons from the lab on Friday had stopped on Fifty-Seventh Street to make another pickup. While he was inside, the truck was broken into and thieves stole the four cartons. They probably didn’t even know what they were stealing.

Brian was beside himself. He went out into the street, digging through trash cans, hoping the thieves had thrown out the cans of film once they saw they hadn’t hijacked a shipment of stereos. Then a call came from the lab in L.A. with more bad news: Some of the four days missing involved the parade scene, in which Jack drives his Jeep through a marching band of Mummers, onto the sidewalk, and through a plate glass window.

The FBI was called in and rewards were posted for the return of the film, no questions asked. But we never recovered the footage. The sequence was reshot at a cost of half a million dollars, covered by insurance. Because the scenes were originally filmed in winter, all the extras had to dress in winter clothing even though the reshoot took place in the summer. In the end, we were able to patch all the “holes” in the film. We finished up, and I took off for a well-deserved vacation.

Blow Out opened in the summer of 1981. I went to see it in the Hamptons, where we had rented a house for the month of August. When Jack gets to Sally too late to save her at the end, the audience actually started booing at the screen. I had never seen such an angry response to a film before. And yet, unpredictably, Blow Out turned out to be one of those early De Palma pictures that survived its initial rejection and is widely admired today.

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